All spring, commercial airline personnel reported UFOs in droves to the air force. These typically involved objects of disc or circular design, combined with exceptional maneuverability and speed. In at least one case, an airport watch supervisor saw an unidentified light split into two lights which revolved around each other, similar to the Kodiak case. Yet another sighting at Los Alamos occurred on April 17, 1950, when more than fifteen people reported seeing a UFO for twenty minutes at two thousand feet on the eastern horizon. One observer, a scientist from the University of California, watched one of the three objects through a telescope and said the object looked flat, metallic, roughly circular, and about nine feet in diameter. The object moved “faster than any known conventional aircraft.” It apparently put on quite a show.55
Up to this point, there had been a few photographs taken of UFOs, some of them of reasonably good quality. But the two pictures taken on May 11, 1950, surpassed in quality and credibility anything up to that point, as well as most photos since. These were the photographs taken in McMinnville, Oregon, by Mr. and Mrs. Paul Trent, a farming couple who saw a classic flying saucer over their land early one evening. They took two clear shots of it. Fortunately, between pictures, as the object was moving away, the couple also changed their position, therefore allowing a detailed photographic analysis of the object. The Trents assumed they had seen some type of exotic military aircraft. They did not develop the film in their camera until they used it up, and showed the photos only to a few friends. Eventually it reached the cover of Life, but even then the Trents never showed any desire to make money from the photos.
In 1968, the Condon Report said of the photos:
This is one of the few UFO cases in which all factors investigated, geometric, psychological, and physical, appear to be consistent with the assertion that an extraordinary flying object, silvery, metallic, disc-shaped, tens of meters in diameter, and evidently artificial, flew within the sight of two witnesses.
In the weeks after their sighting, the Trents were visited by representatives of the air force and FBI and were asked many questions. An air force agent demanded and received the pictures and negatives from Bill Powell, who had persuaded the Trents to loan them to him. Although Powell repeatedly requested the photos and negatives back, the air force never returned them.
Over the years, skeptics made several attempts to prove the photos were a hoax. This was the only viable method of debunking them, as the image cannot in any sense be interpreted as something other than a “flying saucer.” Several computer enhancement tests, however, proved conclusively that the object was not a model suspended on a string—the only seemingly possible hoax method. The Trents themselves have been universally judged to be low-key, honest individuals. As late as 1990, they stood by their story, and the photographs remain a major piece of UFO evidence.56
KEEPING THE LID DOWN
The sightings of the spring of 1950 were the most significant wave since 1947. Ironically, they occurred on the heels of the “final” word by the air force on the subject of flying saucers. So far as the public was concerned, the matter was supposed to be dead, and had appeared to be manageable. But by the middle of 1950, it did not necessarily appear so.
The outbreak of war in Korea on June 23 monopolized American attention and provided the impetus for quadrupling the U.S. military budget. Meanwhile, concern persisted for keeping the lid over UFOs. A July 6 air force memorandum expressed strong interest to acquire motion pictures of a UFO taken by a civilian, but not in a way to arouse suspicion of air force interest.57 Another memorandum dated July 19, from the chief of the Intelligence Technical Analysis Division, stated that too much time was being spent in investigating flying saucer reports. “Excessive contacts can only serve to keep our interest in these matters a subject of discussion by more people than we would like.”58
